What you should know about Flash Video - Part B

Here's something most folks I talk to don't seem to know: Flash is a CPU hog. It seems nothing really good is perfect and that truth certainly applies to the Flash video format. Have you ever seen stuttering in a Flash video playing online? The latest Flash player, Flash Player 9, while better than Flash Player 8, often does not manage its own format very well. Videos sometimes stutter - stuttering is simply skipping frames - making the video seem jerky. The primary culprit are scenes that are panning across a room or landscape. Note: The slower the panning, the less stuttering that will occur.

Flash Player uses a computer's CPU to manage the videos it displays. It does not utilize the video card like Quicktime and Windows Media. That's changing, however, as Flash 10, which is now available as a beta version, does utilize some of the video card's assets and presumably will lower the incidence of stuttering.

Stuttering in Flash is also caused when the machine is busy with other processes. Viewing Flash when your machine is, at that moment, dedicating all of its resources to Flash, is a much better experience than when you have several processes going at the same time. With the introduction of the Core Duo processors and the new generation of video cards that have their own onboard CPU and increased memory, the stuttering issue will soon become a thing of the past.